Net Zero Cities: Growth slows as EV market matures

BOULDER — As the electrical-vehicle technology moves along its evolutionary track from thrilling and revolutionary to fully adopted, market growth seems to have hit a plateau over the past year or so. 

“We’re in a transition and it’s going to be a bit of a bumpy ride as any transition is wont to be,” New Day Hydrogen Inc. CEO Seth Terry said Thursday during a panel discussion at BizWest’s Net Zero Cities conference in Boulder. 

There has been a recent “slowdown in EV growth and many companies struggling to meet their EV goals,” IEdrives Inc. CEO Joe Mitchell said. Meanwhile, big auto manufacturers “are pulling back on their investments because the true market demand isn’t there yet.”

One governor on demand continues to be “technology challenges” such as limited battery life, which causes “range anxiety” for EV drivers, IEdrives senior vice president of business development Kyle Mazanti said. “It’s great that you have all of these mandates and incentives” from the government in an effort to encourage EV production and adoption, he said, “but the technology has to keep up.”

Clean-technology companies and policymakers must seek out a “diversity of solutions” to both narrow technical challenges such as battery life and broad global issues such as climate change, Terry said.

The “ultimate answer” for developing an entirely clean vehicle is source power from a fully renewable energy source and storing it in a zero-emission battery, Mitchell said, and that technology is likely years away.